Microsoft Says Goodbye Hotmail

Microsoft has been busy the past six weeks. It has moved 150 petabytes of email data and 300 million Hotmail email accounts to a completely new platform -- Outlook.com.

To show just what that means, Microsoft released a fun infographic. If all that data was all in the MP3 music file format, it'd take you 300,000 years to bop your way through what would be quite a hefty playlist. If it remained in email form, it would take you 120 million years to get through it all -- at a rate of a mere 50 a day, it has to be said.

The IT giant's Outlook group program manager Dick Craddock wrote in a blog that the new email system has some 300 million accounts moved over from Hotmail and 100 million fresh ones, making this a 400 million address system now.

That's a nice stat, though Microsoft's main rival Google is still ahead, though not by much, with 425 million accounts as of June. Microsoft says one of the program goals with Outlook is get to a billion active users.

In addition to switching customers to new email handles and domains, Microsoft added new features, including a new calendar, Android app (since 125 of the 400 million access their Outlook email, calendar and contacts on a mobile device using Exchange ActiveSync) and support for two-factor authentication. Next up: SMTP send, "so it's easier to send mail from different email addresses," and "deeper integration" with the cloud data facility SkyDrive, Craddock said.

"Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts," he wrote. "This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented. This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes and making sure that every person's mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade. Of course, this had to be done with a live site experience that was handling billions of transactions a day."

So, farewell Hotmail, which almost certainly had users active on it since its 1996 debut.

I will say that I aman active Hotmail user and was completely unaware of the changes, until Ichecked my email and it was Outlook. It was quite a task that they achieved ina reasonable amount of time. I am surprised that they have not been promotingand tooting their own horns on this one. I believe they went through this transition to be just that; one of the big2 email providers.

Good to know that a lowly and free UC Berkeley UNIX application called Hotmail and another one called Skype - has gotten Microsoft this far into world of telecommunications, and messaging - no body ever seems to acknowledge or give credit to early pioneers of social networking (early on) - and the societal impact that University of California has had on contributing freely - cheers to a petabyte of Free BSD email content on a Free Unix box!!.

Why were people with Hotmail accounts told of this. I still have a Hotmail email address - so what happens noW. Not too pleased about this as my outlook was used for talktalk emails then Sky email. Is this why my outlook is not working as the Hotmail has been migrated over???????